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Vanishing Point
A surreal vision of creativity and mourning opens this collection of original poetry, returning to such human themes as desire, memory, and dreams. Exhibiting a dynamic range, the author traces the currents of eroticism and imagination, while charting the skeleton of feeling and the blood of beginnings. Using her voice as a guide through light and dark, chaos and order, the poise and passion of the pieces are striking, as they counterbalance a lyrical grace with a wild formalism.
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 28, 2015
In painting, a vanishing point is where two or more lines of perspective join. This convergence across apparent distance often has the effect of suggesting infinity in the tiniest fleck.
Felicity Plunkett's debut collection Vanishing Point is similarly concerned with the impact of discernible points of difference colliding. Plunkett's imaginative, attentive gaze renders universal subjects particular with detail. From the splitting of the atom to release a large destructive radius of ashen dust to the splintering of birth ('My body broke open like a laugh'), the poems here are often keenly aware how the smallest thing speaks of the largest.
Particularly striking are the poems in the latter half of the collection that concern the fractures and repairs of birth (Delivery, Contractions, The Negative Cutter), the little little beginnings of life bounding against the blanking, compartmentalising universals of medicine.
At other points, there's a detached eroticism married to a real love of language that reveals more and more with each read.
What an unusually, beautifully resolved debut collection this is.
Felicity Plunkett's debut collection Vanishing Point is similarly concerned with the impact of discernible points of difference colliding. Plunkett's imaginative, attentive gaze renders universal subjects particular with detail. From the splitting of the atom to release a large destructive radius of ashen dust to the splintering of birth ('My body broke open like a laugh'), the poems here are often keenly aware how the smallest thing speaks of the largest.
Particularly striking are the poems in the latter half of the collection that concern the fractures and repairs of birth (Delivery, Contractions, The Negative Cutter), the little little beginnings of life bounding against the blanking, compartmentalising universals of medicine.
At other points, there's a detached eroticism married to a real love of language that reveals more and more with each read.
What an unusually, beautifully resolved debut collection this is.
April 11, 2019
My own response to this wonderful collection can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2019/04/10/di...
November 2, 2009
Felicity Plunkett's poetry is just remarkable. Witty, profound, wise and beautiful. One to treasure.
Read
December 20, 2009There's a heady femininity in Felicity Plunkett's Vanishing Point. Taken as a whole, the work creates a semiotic discourse that is so rich with jouissance that I'm reminded strongly of the Helene Cixous' edict "Write yourself. Your body must be heard." (The Laugh of the Medusa). This is Plunkett's unique style -- to take the reader deep within the gestural, rhythmic moment of the body, deconstructing and rebuilding in such a way that something new arises. The work is set up in three sections, each pivoting around the notion of 'flakes'. It's an evocative word, conjuring different associations - from the trivial, as in flakes of skin, bits of nothingness, tiny hints of something that is almost inconsequential at face value, to the more intense idea of disintegration, loss, flaking away, aging, and attempting to piece together that which can't be reconstructed.
"Flakes of a Dream" is, in many ways, the most harsh of the three sections. It opens with the terrible guilt of the Atom Bomb in "Journey of a Dead Man": "Atomic radiance/bursts onto your tongue like ridicule." The work progresses through the wordplay mourning of sitting shiva and Shiva the Hindu destroyer -- bereavement, longing, and renewal taking the personal into the realm of the universal. It's not just the poet's voice that becomes personal. It's also Robert Oppenheimer's voice, the Hindu God Shiva's voice, the voice of the mourning wife, and a myriad of guises from mother, a child watching a father die - "My feelings' syntax made no sense." ("Learning the Bones"), to a grown woman dodging love's commitment:
Your own abjection excites and nauseates you
as you raise your arm
higher, and wait
to lose yourself in gravity. ("Flakes Shaking Free")
The language is tense, intense, and painful, but so taut and fresh that almost every line could be pulled out and recited on its own to powerful effect: "The rhapsodic divorces the epiphanic." ("Cottonwoods Screen Japan"). Though the overall impact of this chapter is mourning, loss, and a dream that is pursued at the edges of memory, there is always a central figure of life -- the speaker standing amidst her destruction. Sitting Shiva progresses to the smashing of glass at a Jewish wedding -- the symbolism of the smashed glass functioning in its traditional role of a reminder of loss amidst celebration:
Your shivaistic tongue soaped,
your bride-silent eyes averted:
there is no washing away. ("The Smashing of the Glass")
Behind every poem in this section is violence, sometimes subtle, as in the hint of annihilation against the tenderness of motherhood in "Ferrying", or the more explicit as in the seven sections of "Your Violent Past": "eyes closed against the rapturous/violence of that fire."
The second section, "A Flake of your Life" is lighter, achieving power and intensity through an exploration of love, rather than death. The poems move in closer, and most take a second person perspective, putting the reader in the intimate role of addressee. The poems skirt around the heart, finding meaning and creation in those words and moments that struggle to form, and appear to miss:
In flakes you glimpse a future,
or some other time, ghosted with imaginings:
what we slough off unaware
might become, for someone else, precious and troubling.("A Flake of Your Life")
Alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm are all used to powerful effect, with a number of the poems using strong structural elements. "Sea-Margins" for example, employs a beautiful circular repetition with its Italian sonnet form. This poem reminds of Edna St. Vincent Millay at her best, with its rhythms and problem/resolution structure:
rise humming: I listen for the place, where,
in shells' curled ears, the sea's lost memory sleeps
entwined with coral, brine and water's glare.
My drying thighs forget its salty deeps.
The final section, “To Break into Flakes”, moves in so close that the human body becomes almost abstract: cerebellum, cerebrum, the uterus, the perineum, pelvis, veins, contractions, milk filled breasts, clavicles, and blood beating below the surface of skin all provide fodder for exploration. The poems move around sex, childbirth, DNA, but above all, motherhood, uncovered in the most personal, intimate details, and broadened into the universal:
love's vernix whitens two swimmers
against the cold before
the depths disgorge them,
blood-gas fizzing,
finding ways of breathing again: new ways. (“Undersea”)
In Plunkett's world, everything is animated, life and death working hand in hand to create something new and unknown:
Cells fidgeted and shaped themselves:
a factory of lines, alive, industrious:
moving out to start new stories
the generation of everything:
the blood's start.(“The Geometry of Vanishing”)
Viewing birth through the eyes of death and death as creator of life, Vanishing Point moves in closely enough for the reader to recognise the personal contours of domesticity – a life progression that is almost shockingly familiar and intimate, while moving outward enough to create its own mythology. The poetry is dense, with inventive imagery; uncompromisingly charting female experience, rage, love, tenderness, hunger and fear, across the human body and through imagination. Even at its most painful, in the midst of Cancer, bodily violence, or nuclear annihilation, there is a wry humour and detachment – a winking eye towards precision in meaning. In every poem in this collection, there is always a turning point, a swift transition, and a denouement that is sharp. This is a collection that is instantly accessible, but invites multiple re-readings, each time finding something new, fresh and inventive in its lines.
"Flakes of a Dream" is, in many ways, the most harsh of the three sections. It opens with the terrible guilt of the Atom Bomb in "Journey of a Dead Man": "Atomic radiance/bursts onto your tongue like ridicule." The work progresses through the wordplay mourning of sitting shiva and Shiva the Hindu destroyer -- bereavement, longing, and renewal taking the personal into the realm of the universal. It's not just the poet's voice that becomes personal. It's also Robert Oppenheimer's voice, the Hindu God Shiva's voice, the voice of the mourning wife, and a myriad of guises from mother, a child watching a father die - "My feelings' syntax made no sense." ("Learning the Bones"), to a grown woman dodging love's commitment:
Your own abjection excites and nauseates you
as you raise your arm
higher, and wait
to lose yourself in gravity. ("Flakes Shaking Free")
The language is tense, intense, and painful, but so taut and fresh that almost every line could be pulled out and recited on its own to powerful effect: "The rhapsodic divorces the epiphanic." ("Cottonwoods Screen Japan"). Though the overall impact of this chapter is mourning, loss, and a dream that is pursued at the edges of memory, there is always a central figure of life -- the speaker standing amidst her destruction. Sitting Shiva progresses to the smashing of glass at a Jewish wedding -- the symbolism of the smashed glass functioning in its traditional role of a reminder of loss amidst celebration:
Your shivaistic tongue soaped,
your bride-silent eyes averted:
there is no washing away. ("The Smashing of the Glass")
Behind every poem in this section is violence, sometimes subtle, as in the hint of annihilation against the tenderness of motherhood in "Ferrying", or the more explicit as in the seven sections of "Your Violent Past": "eyes closed against the rapturous/violence of that fire."
The second section, "A Flake of your Life" is lighter, achieving power and intensity through an exploration of love, rather than death. The poems move in closer, and most take a second person perspective, putting the reader in the intimate role of addressee. The poems skirt around the heart, finding meaning and creation in those words and moments that struggle to form, and appear to miss:
In flakes you glimpse a future,
or some other time, ghosted with imaginings:
what we slough off unaware
might become, for someone else, precious and troubling.("A Flake of Your Life")
Alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm are all used to powerful effect, with a number of the poems using strong structural elements. "Sea-Margins" for example, employs a beautiful circular repetition with its Italian sonnet form. This poem reminds of Edna St. Vincent Millay at her best, with its rhythms and problem/resolution structure:
rise humming: I listen for the place, where,
in shells' curled ears, the sea's lost memory sleeps
entwined with coral, brine and water's glare.
My drying thighs forget its salty deeps.
The final section, “To Break into Flakes”, moves in so close that the human body becomes almost abstract: cerebellum, cerebrum, the uterus, the perineum, pelvis, veins, contractions, milk filled breasts, clavicles, and blood beating below the surface of skin all provide fodder for exploration. The poems move around sex, childbirth, DNA, but above all, motherhood, uncovered in the most personal, intimate details, and broadened into the universal:
love's vernix whitens two swimmers
against the cold before
the depths disgorge them,
blood-gas fizzing,
finding ways of breathing again: new ways. (“Undersea”)
In Plunkett's world, everything is animated, life and death working hand in hand to create something new and unknown:
Cells fidgeted and shaped themselves:
a factory of lines, alive, industrious:
moving out to start new stories
the generation of everything:
the blood's start.(“The Geometry of Vanishing”)
Viewing birth through the eyes of death and death as creator of life, Vanishing Point moves in closely enough for the reader to recognise the personal contours of domesticity – a life progression that is almost shockingly familiar and intimate, while moving outward enough to create its own mythology. The poetry is dense, with inventive imagery; uncompromisingly charting female experience, rage, love, tenderness, hunger and fear, across the human body and through imagination. Even at its most painful, in the midst of Cancer, bodily violence, or nuclear annihilation, there is a wry humour and detachment – a winking eye towards precision in meaning. In every poem in this collection, there is always a turning point, a swift transition, and a denouement that is sharp. This is a collection that is instantly accessible, but invites multiple re-readings, each time finding something new, fresh and inventive in its lines.
January 21, 2020
Each poetry collection I have read this year has been revelatory in some form or another whether that is concept, content, ideas, lyricism, imagery, form, and Felicity's "Vanishing Point" has been another of those texts. It is a masterclass.
The lyrical density of Felicity's collection and its etymological labyrinths of meaning keep you on the page, holding on to each poem before turning the page.
This is a challenging collection to read because it forces you to confront yourself and your relationship to the language we use to express ourselves.
The content excavates death and destruction, creation and creativity in the minutiae of the everyday, and in doing so, makes the application universal. It's a wild read. It's ferocious. Declamatory, tender, evocative, erotic, brutal, fertile with its words and ideas.
The collection is divided into three sections, Flakes of a Dream, Flakes of Your Life, To Break Into Flakes, and the motif continues throughout the poem, and the idea stuck in my mind, and it's not one mentioned in the poems, of the pilled and piled fragments of an eraser when drawing. An act of erasure and removal in the act of creating; a pencil is destroyed in the act of drawing, and this feels like the balance Felicity is aiming for in this remarkable collection of poems.
The fecundity of imagery meant trying to find one thing to draw was nigh on impossible, hence a composite sketch, that for me, encapsulated the sense of flakes that are destructive and creative. Yes, a skull breastfeeding a baby is not a usual representation of a poetry collection but for me it captures the depth of Felicitiy's work. It is a collage, or flakes, of different variations I tried.
She has a new collection due out this year, A Kinder Sea. Order it now.
The lyrical density of Felicity's collection and its etymological labyrinths of meaning keep you on the page, holding on to each poem before turning the page.
This is a challenging collection to read because it forces you to confront yourself and your relationship to the language we use to express ourselves.
The content excavates death and destruction, creation and creativity in the minutiae of the everyday, and in doing so, makes the application universal. It's a wild read. It's ferocious. Declamatory, tender, evocative, erotic, brutal, fertile with its words and ideas.
The collection is divided into three sections, Flakes of a Dream, Flakes of Your Life, To Break Into Flakes, and the motif continues throughout the poem, and the idea stuck in my mind, and it's not one mentioned in the poems, of the pilled and piled fragments of an eraser when drawing. An act of erasure and removal in the act of creating; a pencil is destroyed in the act of drawing, and this feels like the balance Felicity is aiming for in this remarkable collection of poems.
The fecundity of imagery meant trying to find one thing to draw was nigh on impossible, hence a composite sketch, that for me, encapsulated the sense of flakes that are destructive and creative. Yes, a skull breastfeeding a baby is not a usual representation of a poetry collection but for me it captures the depth of Felicitiy's work. It is a collage, or flakes, of different variations I tried.
She has a new collection due out this year, A Kinder Sea. Order it now.
June 24, 2024
It’s not that this was bad; I just don’t think that I’m at a point in my life where this poetry can reach me (I’m not sure I’ll ever get get there) so I didn’t wind up enjoying this as much as I could have.
Other than that, I think the poet is a beautiful writer who makes use of beautiful imagery and strong metaphors and I can definitely see myself reading her other works.
Other than that, I think the poet is a beautiful writer who makes use of beautiful imagery and strong metaphors and I can definitely see myself reading her other works.
August 7, 2011
I do not read much poetry and as such, may not know how to appropriately read or react to poetry. Given that, poems in this volume made me think and that is perhaps one achievement of this volume.
September 4, 2021
A worthy and deserving winner of the Thomas Shapcott.
April 19, 2017
I'm still not entirely sure how to approach poetry, nor how to interact with it, but I liked this collection nonetheless. It taught me that I have a poor vocabulary, and that poetry and childbirth and film can all be woven together to form art. I also had to stop, more than once, to appreciate some of the turns of phrase, which is always a good sign in my book.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews